It's hard to get too excited about the implementation of this, because it's actually very small and specific — Bing is indexing the Twitter streams of a few thousand "prime movers" and digerati and showing those results for specific queries like "Kara Swisher tweets." Still, it is exciting to see some loud and vocal challenges finally coming to Google, who to date has essentially only faced small and scrappy Davids to its Goliath (if you forget about Yahoo which, sadly, is quite easy to do).

It's also another stake in what is going to be a heated battle over real-time web search, with a veritable fleet of small startups emerging to tackle the problem and now the major players acknowledging they simply must confront real time and beginning to make actual implementations. If you're interested in this space, check out a recent op-ed on TechCrunch by Mary Hodder that discusses some of the many issues to be teased out to solve the real time web search and discovery problem well.

By the way, although Google itself hasn't made any specific announcement surrounding the real time web, there are third parties providing a way to incorporate Twitter search results within Google:

• Twoquick
• Twitter search Firefox add-on

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